Education in Victoria is both free and compulsory, and yet the position of the State, or public schools is perfectly different from that of the Council schools at home. Once I was living in a little West Country town in England where the Rector, by sheer force of brains, had raised himself from a Board school to the position which he held. He was a most cultivated and charming man, but the matter of his education was never forgotten. Whenever he did anything his parishioners did not approve of—as even an archangel must have done, certainly he would have been no archangel if he had not—there was a shrugging of shoulders, and the inevitable remark: “Well, what can you expect from a man that’s been at a Board school?”
In Australia the fact of a boy being educated at a State school tells against him no whit unless it be among the very few rich people who like to consider themselves exclusive, idle people, of no consequence whatever in any affair of moment. Many families who are but moderately well off send their boys to the State schools while they are quite young, as at home they would send them to a Preparatory. When they reach the age of thirteen or fourteen they then enter them at one of the big schools corresponding to the lesser public schools at home, such as Wellington, Clifton, or Cheltenham. In Melbourne the principal among these schools are the Church of England Grammar School, the Presbyterian College—a beautiful grey stone building, covered in the autumn with a mantle of crimson creeper, and presenting more the appearance of a dignified old English dwelling-house than any building I have ever seen in Victoria—and the Scots College.
There is nothing higher than these—or need be, for the type of boy they produce, and the education both mental and physical, that they supply is most admirable. If an English Duke settled in Melbourne and wanted to send his son to school, it is between these three that he would have to choose; where his son’s class-mate might be a boy who had received his primary education in a State school, absolutely no slur whatever being cast on him on that account. Boys in England are the most arrant snobs. They are inoculated with it from the cradle. They must not play with the coachman’s children because they are common; they must not—if they belong to what is known as “the county”—play with the local lawyer’s boys or the grammar-school boys because they are “cads,” which reminds me of a fine definition of the two words “cad” and “snob”: “cads are the people we won’t know, and snobs are the people who won’t know us.” I find very little, if any, tendency of this sort in the Australian boy. A fellow is good at games or a “rotter,” and who his father and mother are, and whether he was or was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, does not concern his companions in the very least. It is not that the boys are any better or any worse than elsewhere; it is simply that they have not heard all the talk about position that is constantly ringing in the ears of an English lad. When I took my small boy home there was so much objection made to him playing with what were called “common children” that I was forced to try to explain to him the difference between the classes, with the effect that his whole ideas of right and wrong became hopelessly muddled; the discussion, as I remember it, running somewhat like this:
“But why mayn’t I play with them, mummy? They are good boys.”
“Yes, dear, but they are not gentlemen.”
“Why, what have they done?”
“Well, is it their daddies or their mammies have been naughty?”
“No, dear; they are quite good. It’s only that they are not in the same position that you are.”
“Is it because they are poor that you don’t like them? ’cause we are poor too.” And so on, till the only way out of the difficulty—the true invidiousness of which had, by years of absence, grown to seem as completely mysterious to me as it did to him—lay in imposing upon him the meaningless command to “do as you are told, and ask no questions.”